Writer-director Marc Meyers wanted to make a movie about a serial killer. Not a slashing-gashing horror flick, but an exploration of the killer's early life, the making of.
He and Jody Girgenti, his producing partner and wife, thought the story of an outlier with a broken psyche would make for a provocative independent film. Meyers envisioned modeling the structure of the script after James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."
In October 2011, he ventured to Comic Con in New York, meeting with as many publishers as he could. One of the people who worked for Abrams ComicArts mentioned something unique they were preparing to publish.
"They didn't even have the book out on display. But they told me about it and gave me an advance private copy that they had stashed under the desk," Meyers said.
The book was anything but typical Comic Con fare. It was a graphic novel about the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, the rapist, cannibal and serial killer of 17 victims, who grew up in Ohio, was arrested in Wisconsin in 1991 and was murdered in prison in 1994.
It was an enthralling story, beautifully drawn, alternating between dark, grim moments and comedic asides.
But it wasn't called "Psycho Killer," "The Face of Evil" or "Jeff: Portrait of a Murdering Machine."
The title was "My Friend Dahmer." Friend?
Meyers realized: Why make up fiction when you can tell a real story? "On some level, as my mom once advised, if you put it out there in the universe, it will come back to you," he said by phone from New York. "It was a perfect symbiotic moment. Kismet."
The graphic novel "My Friend Dahmer" was written by Derf Backderf, a former Akron Beacon Journal artist who grew up in Richfield and was a classmate of Dahmer's at Revere High School in the 1970s.
The book does not wallow in the sensational or the speculative. It is a genuine, sober account of a teenager devolving into disturbing behavior. In addition to canvassing former classmates and teachers, Backderf studied FBI files, transcripts of interviews with Dahmer and news reports. The book includes extensive footnotes.
It was published in 2012 to great acclaim.
"It took 20 years to make the book, five more years to make the film," said Backderf at the Ohio premiere of "My Friend Dahmer" in September at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque. "So this is the end result of a quarter-century of work, which really just depresses the hell out of me."
People wanted to know: What were the signs? Could he tell? How? Why?
"I have no insight whatsoever," Backderf said. "I'm not a psychologist. The last time I saw Jeff was, I think, at our graduation [in 1978]. After that he vanished. Once he started to kill, I lost interest in him. He's just another boring monster at that point."
SHOOTING IN OHIO
"My Friend Dahmer," starring Ross Lynch, Anne Heche, Dallas Roberts and Alex Wolff, opened in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.
The film started pre-production in July 2016, and the shoot lasted from early August through Labor Day weekend. The crew rented a warehouse in Brecksville and filmed in several Northeast Ohio locations.
Revere school district officials would not allow the film to shoot there, so Meyers and crew created "William Dawes High School" and filmed at Middleburg Heights Middle School, which had a suitably '70s look.
"We had to shoot those scenes first, before the real students started arriving," Meyers said.
Summit Mall was also a no-go, so they created a '70s-era shopping center at the decrepit and mostly abandoned Euclid Square Mall. "That was a huge operation for us," Meyers said. "We decorated it as best we could and used tons of extras."
When Meyers was working on the script in 2012, he came out to Ohio and hung out with Backderf for a few days, visiting the real-life sites of the novel.
"Derf showed me around where he grew up," said Meyers. "We drove around those roads in Akron and Richfield and Bath."
Dahmer's childhood house on West Bath Road in Bath was still standing. In fact, by then it was owned by a friend of Backderf's, musician Chris Butler of the Waitresses and Tin Huey fame. Butler let them use the house.
The three-bedroom home on a slope tucked in the woods was transformed with period-appropriate couches, lamps, ashtrays and knickknacks. The crew also built a shed on the site of Dahmer's former hut where he would hide road kill in various states of decay, for dissolving and dismembering purposes. They shot there for six days in August 2016.
"They wanted it to look a bit '70s tacky," Butler said. "It couldn't look too cool because in the script, Joyce [Dahmer's mom] wants to remodel." His home survived the film crew invasion. "The house did damn well," he said. "They had 60 people in there."
Instead of creating a fake house on a soundstage, or shooting at one in California or Canada, they had Dahmer's actual house, where he lived with his younger brother and parents, and where he killed and dismembered his first victim in 1978.
It was a real coup for the production. Richard Brooks' 1967 film "In Cold Blood" shot inside the Kansas home where the Clutter family was murdered, but it's not de rigueur for film crews to have access to such places.
ROSS LYNCH IMPRESSES
The meaning of the setting was not lost on the young star of the film. Ross Lynch inhabits Jeffrey Dahmer with a glazed demeanor of detachment and lonely desperation. It is a riveting performance and a sharp departure from his days as Austin Moon in Austin & Ally on the Disney Channel. (See accompanying movie review.)
"The house was quite lovely. I was surrounded by this lush scenery and I was at ease," said Lynch on the phone from New York.
"The crew, however, was walking on eggshells. They were really quiet. No goofing around. They all felt that eerie vibe that came from the house. A few key scenes that brought out the darker side of Dahmer brought out the darker sides of the house."
Lynch, who also fronts the band R5, which includes siblings Rydel, Riker and Rocky, knew little about the real Dahmer, but was drawn to the character and the film's powerful story. From some archival footage, he was able to emulate Dahmer's hunched, trudging walk.
"I come from a dance background," Lynch said. "I saw his walk once and that was it. I don't even know if anyone was anticipating me doing this awkward-walk thing. The first day on set, I remember watching playback and I was like, 'Oh, yeah. The walk. It's gotta stay.'"
His time in Ohio was in sharp contrast to touring with his band or singing and dancing in music videos, or Disney Channel fluff like "Teen Beach Movie."
"One of the coolest things about the project was being in the actual locations," Lynch said. "Everyone from the film is really appreciative of the Akron community. They were so welcoming, surprisingly, because we weren't talking about the most uplifting human being that ever came out of Akron, Ohio."
Meyers considered more than 100 young actors for the role.
"When I met Ross I thought he was really charming and very smart," Meyers said. "From watching his Disney shows, I knew he could take on the posture and the gait, and he had a likeness that got even stronger once we got to wardrobe and hair and put those glasses on."
Lynch, the handsome, 21-year-old darling of tweens and teens, admits that taking on the role was "high risk, high reward."
"The fact that I was coming from the Disney Channel, it was just really intriguing to do this 180 flip. My family's reaction was mostly, 'Wow, Ross is going off to play a serial killer.'"
He said he picked up a lot from the different acting approaches of his cast mates, including Heche, Roberts, Wolff and Vincent Kartheiser.
"I learned so much from Anne Heche," Lynch said. "The first day she came on set, she just had this amazing work ethic. She just wanted to make the best film that we could possibly make. When the camera wasn't even on her, she was trying to provoke a reaction out of me."
After opening in New York and Los Angeles, the film will expand across the country. It will be interesting to gauge the reaction of audiences. Some may be drawn to theaters by the Dahmer name, others may be repelled.
"Meeting with producers when we were pitching the film, you could tell that some of them wanted to exploit the name of Dahmer for the sake of a horror movie," Meyers said.
"Jody and I felt we were the guardians of Derf's book, and we weren't going to let that happen. He knew that we would tell a different kind of story."
